"The artifex verborum of the dream ... was no less adept than the waking Coleridge in the metamorphosis of words." — John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu.Observations on language (mostly ancient), religion, and culture.
By Edward M. Cook, Ph.D.

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Scenes and Observations from SBL Atlanta 2010

In no particular order ...

Two huge ballrooms were assigned to a session attended by about 15 people.

My room, thankfully, was in a tower (Hyatt) where I didn't have to go up in one of those glass elevators.

Best meal: Atlanta Grill, with Marty Abegg and James Bowley. We planned the next volume of the Dead Sea Scrolls Concordance.

I bought two books: The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism by Adele Berlin and the Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis.

The good people at Accordance updated me and fixed me up with a ton of awesome software.

The most crowded session I attended was the one on Biblioblogging. I listened to Jim Davila's and Chris Brady's excellent papers on the state of the art, then had to go to another session. Chris suggested (as you can read here) that there be an SBL committee to provide peer-review insight on the tenure-relevant research found in online sources. I agree if the sources are research resources, but not if they are blogs. Blogs should resist "sivilizin'".

Jim Davila is still watching Lost.

Against all probability, the guy I sat next to at the Bloggers lunch lives only a few blocks away from me.